10 ms·

Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

161 points by JohnHammersley 9y ago

zombieprocesses 9y ago
Firstly, when did prediction and conjecture become news? Would be great if the news industry stuck to actual news. Secondly, lets hope so and lets hope that will finally put an end to the crazy amount of hit pieces by the media on facebook and social media. Has anyone older ever witnessed anything like this before? The media, both in the US and the UK, has been obsessed with facebook and social media for past year. It's like someone declared war on facebook/social media and ordered the entire industry to attack them. The only thing I can compare it to is north korea's media's rabid attacks on SK, US and Japan. Anyone else "entertained/exasperated" by the media blitz against facebook.
- dang 9y ago
  Articles don't have to be news in the narrow sense to do well here. They need to gratify intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - zombieprocesses 9y ago
    I wasn't talking about hacker news. I was talking about the bbc. I was asking why the bbc published a non-news story, not why it was here. I was just saying the news industry should publish news rather than conjecture or predictions.
    - dang 9y ago
      Ah I see! Well, you'd have to take it up with them, but the BBC publishes all kinds of things.
      - gaius 9y ago
        the BBC publishes all kinds of things Mostly "someone said something on Twitter" and "here are some more personal opinions of Laura Kuenssberg". Their days of being a serious news organisation are long over.
        dang 9y ago
        That's a popular kind of thing to say on the internet, but IMO a good habit to stay out of. From an HN point of view it's far from true: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc.co.uk%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc.co.uk%20points%3E10&sort=b... https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc.com%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc.com%20points%3E10&sort=byD...
verstandhandel 9y ago
I like the irony :D "Eight reasons Facebook has peaked" "please follow me on Twitter or Facebook"
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  Well, "peaked" means it's as powerful as it will ever be.
SlowBro 9y ago
What are the masses switching to?
- namelost 9y ago
  The real world, let's hope.
  - SlowBro 9y ago
    ...he wrote on a message board ;-)
  - bernardino 9y ago
    Yay for the real world! I recently deleted almost all my accounts online, i.e. Github, LinkedIn, Twitter. I only have this account left and few others which are for learning purposes. I don't know for certain why, but I feel this need to be empty in a sort of way and do away with the non-essentials: digitally, physically, and internally, i.e. use the terminal instead of an ide, use technological devices less and do more natural things, and stop interpreting things, respectively. Though then again, I hope my nonexistent online presence is not a negative to future employers as I complete my bachelor's in a few years. It seems if you want to work for company x, you should be using product x. That's probably not the case but it does seem like it.
    - lou1306 9y ago
      Well, at least an active Github account is a sufficient (but non-necessary) proof that you have at least a basic understanding of Git. But still, there are lots of ways to captivate employers: a good old coding blog can beat many a LinkedIn profile.
- jabwork 9y ago
  I read this as an assertion the masses are losing interest overall, not switching to a competitor
  - mathgeek 9y ago
dang 9y ago
I'm not sure if this article can support a substantive discussion or not, but thought it might be worth the trick of taking a more complex phrase for the title in the hope of stimulating more substantive responses. HN threads are often like those psych tests that measure complexity of response by time delay. It's a bit weird, but there's some reason to believe that just the small tax it imposes on the brain to parse a complex title may slow it down enough to discourage pure reflex in reaction. Reflective, not reflexive, reactions are what we're going for here.
- pbalau 9y ago
  If I understand correctly what you said, I think it worked. It took ~30 mins for the first "I dont use fb anymore because it's evil" reply. Unfortunatelly, not great debate started in the quaiet timeframe
- JohnHammersley 9y ago
  Thanks dang, I used the title from the article, but much prefer the updated one. Hoping it will generate some interesting discussion
- sytse 9y ago
  Love your consideration in order to get us to reflection.
VHRanger 9y ago
I mean Facebook has arguably reached all the audience it could reach. The only way they could keep growing is the increase time spent on their platform. That said Id conjecture the optimization towards short term reward cycles (more clickbaity articles being recommended, etc.) loses customer loyalty over the long run
- IshKebab 9y ago
  Yes but the point is that it is now losing people that it used to reach because it's too full of advertising, shitty memes and fwd:fwd:fwd: tag your friend in this if... And they never really adequately solved the "my aunt sent me a friend request and will be offended if I don't accept it" problem. Everything I used to share on Facebook I now share on WhatsApp because it has no advertising and my actual friends are likely to see it. Smart buy by Facebook.
juststeve 9y ago
social media has peaked? which sites are still growing in westernized countries?
TeeWEE 9y ago
I stopped looking often at Facebook. I don't like their upgrade and more people are posting stupid things on the network. To be honest I don't care about it anymore. Instagram, whatsapp and Snapchat have taken over most of Facebook imho.
0x7f800000 9y ago
Anecdotally, I'm one of the people who walked away from Facebook this year, due to exhaustion, disinterest, disgust, protest, or other (negative) reasons. I don't miss it and won't be going back. Amusingly, after about a week, Facebook started emailing me to try to entice me to come back. So I logged back in to disable those emails.
araes 9y ago
In a math sense, the signal to noise ratio on FB became much higher over the last decade. At inception, it was a focused way to directly communicate with a close college circle. Now its effectively as open as Myspace, bombards you with ads, and as with all wide networks, the discourse has dropped to meme / quiz bot level (Which annoying social media app represents you?!)
- psyc 9y ago
  I remember the main draw early on being the simple, uniform UI, especially in contrast to MySpace. White, blue, feed, photos. Product designers just never know when to quit.
  - samsonradu 9y ago
    Well it certainly is a business decision. Likely Facebook knows better when it needs to canibalize its own product and squeeze the most profit out of it then move on. Instagram is now the social place to be.
- rhizome 9y ago
  In a math sense, the signal to noise ratio on FB became much higher over the last decade. At inception, it was a focused way to directly communicate with a close college circle. Now its effectively as open as Myspace, bombards you with ads, and as with all wide networks, the discourse has dropped to meme / quiz bot level I think you mean "much lower" signal to noise ratio.
  - diegoperini 9y ago
    I'm a non native English speaker. Which one is more suitable for "less quality"?
    - lou1306 9y ago
      Lower. High SNR = Much signal, little noise Low SNR = Much signal, much noise
clay_the_ripper 9y ago
I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Facebook account. Just having a Facebook account that you “don’t use” allows a massive amount of value (from an advertisers perspective) to be unlocked. In my opinion no other network is going to be able to compete with the number of users on facebooks platform, and any that do, Facebook will buy or copy (Instagram and Snapchat respectively). Even if you don’t actively look at anything on Facebook, or even log in, the fact that you have a Facebook account allows advertisers to track and target you with ads on all sorts of platforms and websites that are available to Facebook advertisers through the audience network (ad placements on millions of websites and mobile apps). The crucial moat that Facebook has is simply the massive nimber of registered users (that correspond to people’s real identity) on the platform combined with sophisticated tools to reach those users both on and off Facebook. I’d love to hear an opposing argument, but the way I see it Facebook is here to stay and will only get bigger and more profitable in the foreseeable future.
- utellme 9y ago
  It's correct and incorrect at the same time. Social networks like cars, they give value when it's being used. To sell ads social networks must be sure that someone scrolling feeds. No usage - no gains. Even with huge amount of users data nothing guaranteed. You can't sell same stuff periodically, big data has value only when they are actual.
  - clay_the_ripper 9y ago
    That’s the point though-they don’t need you to scroll to make money off you. You only need a registered account, and they can track a massive amount about what you do online and then serve you ads across millions of sites and mobile apps. All of this happens off of Facebook owned properties.
utellme 9y ago
Almost nobody talks about lack of trust, yes there are words about fake news and formal reassurances from FB staff that they will investigate, fix and so on. But trust was already undermined, you just can't restore it to previous level. People were reading news in FB feed and didn't even think it can be fake, now they read and go "outside" for fact checking. Not a good sign for social network which wants you to be engaged all the time.
- zer00eyz 9y ago
  > People were reading news in FB feed and didn't even think it can be fake, now they read and go "outside" for fact checking. You know this is an interesting topic in and of itself. Are people looking outside FB for news? I would argue that if FB supports your world view that people aren't looking outside of it. Others have had the same theory: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli... The reality is that the internet provides a platform to even the most marginal ideas, time cubes, flat earths, and lots of rather stupid ideas that have no basis in logic or reason. If these things appeal to you seeing them in print and on video will only bolster ones false reasoning and allow you to further push out other points of view.
  - utellme 9y ago
    I won't agree that internet provides you with such level of information. Internet is a service, it can't figure out your desires, but FB and other social networks really try to do it. The only reason such for fake news being spreaded everywhere are suggests and recommendations from social networks feed. They multiply junk and fakes.
- dreamcompiler 9y ago
  Trust is my issue too. I've put almost no personal information on FB since the day I opened my account. But over the last year it's gotten worse: I trust the news sources less, I trust the ads less, I deleted the FB app, and I trust the FB company least of all. That translates to me posting less and spending less time on the website, and never "just using FB" to sign up for another website. And you know what? I'm happier with less FB in my life.
dannyr 9y ago
This may be true for Facebook in the US and other developed countries. Facebook is still making inroads in countries that are just getting connectivity (like Myanmar). Revenues will come from developed countries though so I'm not sure if Facebook can sustain its business off developing countries.
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
Facebook is just getting started. Imagine you have a dataset that can identify over a billion people around the world simply by looking at their face. When you walk into McDonalds, cameras analyze you and the people you enter with. Oh, there's John Smith and his friend Tom. He loves the McFlurry. Instantly the digital menus rearrange to feature a large McFlurry, animating and advertising a deal on the largest size. Facebook is just beginning to monetize the value of what they have created.
- sfilargi 9y ago
  Facebook, the company != Facebook, the platform I think the arguments in the article, at least most of them, are focusing on the platform.
- shostrift 9y ago
  GDPR will prevent that unless there's an active opt-in, so you can strike out EU citizens from that scenario.
- dasil003 9y ago
  Why would Macdonald’s pay for that? Tom is already in McDonald’s and is going to buy what he wants. There’s no incremental value in making the menu confusing by changing it all the time.
  - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
    They’re not changing the menu, they’re just subtly highlighting things, offering discounts, etc. And yeah, he’s in the store already, but if they can sell him MORE on that visit, that’s good. How much do you think McDonalds would pay for a magic camera + menu that boosted all their store revenue by 5% overnight?
    - genghizkhan 9y ago
      Less than 5% of their revenue for sure.
    - 9y ago
scarface74 9y ago
Without going to deeply into the content of the article, just because a company has “peaked” doesn’t mean it’s “failing”. IBM peaked decades ago, but still has a somewhat successful business. Microsoft peaked in terms of influence probably a decade ago, but is still important. I doubt that Facebook will go the way of MySpace or Yahoo anytime soon.
- askafriend 9y ago
  Not only is Microsoft still important, their stock performance has been pretty phenomenal in the past decade.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
scythe 9y ago
Facebook just needs to lose its "evil" image. I could throw out ideas but let's face it everyone does that and I have zero experience running a social network. Right now the biggest obstacle facing Facebook is that people are starting to think that using Facebook is bad for you and bad for society. Facebook cannot survive in such a climate indefinitely. If it's true, make it false. If it's false, prove it.
- rock_hard 9y ago
  Well said. Though I could imagine that only <1% of FB users are aware of all the headlines we get served here on HN every day...so it’s probably not a real issue
git-pull 9y ago
They're influencing the internet in more ways than just social stuff, though. From a technology perspective, Facebook is doing solid work. And it looks like they're continuing the trend - rather than being at the end of it. Facebook's open source footprint is quite influential. Namely, React + Redux + Reselect are pretty sweet. React-Native. Haven't used it, but hhvm. And I haven't heard of this one before, but it looks cool: https://github.com/facebook/prepack https://github.com/facebook/prepack https://github.com/facebook https://github.com/facebook That's a nice portfolio.
- bcherny 9y ago
  Prepack is one of the coolest ideas to come out of FB OSS. The idea is to run your JS program as part of compilation, evaluating it as much as you can. Then take what's left in the heap and serialize it back to JS. Then ship that to browsers/devices. AFAIK, that sort of AoT evaluation has been limited to academia and niche applications in Haskell and OCaml because purity analysis is so tricky in languages that don't track effects.
  - ikeyany 9y ago
    > The idea is to run your JS program as part of compilation, evaluating it as much as you can. Then take what's left in the heap and serialize it back to JS. Then ship that to browsers/devices. Could you elaborate on what is cool about that? I feel like I'm missing something...sounds like it analyzes javascript to make it run faster.
    - bcherny 9y ago
      If you have some JavaScript code, it goes through a few phases as it's evaluated by your browser: 1. Parsing 2. JIT optimizing 3. Compilation to bytecode 4. Re-optimization as the program runs Steps 1 and 2 are expensive, and there are a few ways to cut down on them: - Removing dead code before you ship - Optimizing your code for the JIT compiler (eg. Closure Compiler does this) - Webassembly - Pre-evaluating your code with Prepack More philosophically, the question is "when does my code run?". The answer has usually been "on the client". With Prepack, the answer is "as much as possible during compilation, and the remainder on the client".
LewYard 9y ago
Are we talking about facebook.com the website, or Facebook the company ?
greggarious 9y ago
I deleted my Facebook account two years ago (Valentine's day 2016). Before doing so I reached out to my close/medium ties and exchanged numbers, encouraging them to check out Signal as a way to contact me. Some of them demurred (nothing to hide) but pretty much everyone adopted Signal after the election, heh. I don't have a huge amount of "friends" now, but I have a small group of people I text or call occasionally. I feel happier and more connected than I did using Facebook.
starchild_3001 9y ago
Hey guys, don't believe in doomsayers. Market (aggregate opinion of investors) is often smarter than each individual. The market assigns a fairly healthy P/E ratio to FB. Similar to that of Google. Both better than that of AAPL. All in all, I'd ignore this dude's predictions. Facebook has a bunch of smart people. Market is factoring in plenty of growth into FB's stock. Given market's expectations, I'd bet this guy is wrong. https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/pe-ratio https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/pe-ratio https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/goog/pe-ratio https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/goog/pe-ratio http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/pe-ratio http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/pe-ratio (2018 was a special year due to a one-time write-off, check out 2019 and beyond)

Firstly, when did prediction and conjecture become news? Would be great if the news industry stuck to actual news. Secondly, lets hope so and lets hope that will finally put an end to the crazy amount of hit pieces by the media on facebook and social media. Has anyone older ever witnessed anything like this before? The media, both in the US and the UK, has been obsessed with facebook and social media for past year. It's like someone declared war on facebook/social media and ordered the entire industry to attack them. The only thing I can compare it to is north korea's media's rabid attacks on SK, US and Japan. Anyone else "entertained/exasperated" by the media blitz against facebook.

dang 9y ago
Articles don't have to be news in the narrow sense to do well here. They need to gratify intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- zombieprocesses 9y ago
  I wasn't talking about hacker news. I was talking about the bbc. I was asking why the bbc published a non-news story, not why it was here. I was just saying the news industry should publish news rather than conjecture or predictions.
  - dang 9y ago
    Ah I see! Well, you'd have to take it up with them, but the BBC publishes all kinds of things.
    - gaius 9y ago
      the BBC publishes all kinds of things Mostly "someone said something on Twitter" and "here are some more personal opinions of Laura Kuenssberg". Their days of being a serious news organisation are long over.
      - dang 9y ago
        That's a popular kind of thing to say on the internet, but IMO a good habit to stay out of. From an HN point of view it's far from true: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc.co.uk%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc.co.uk%20points%3E10&sort=b... https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc.com%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc.com%20points%3E10&sort=byD...

verstandhandel 9y ago

I like the irony :D "Eight reasons Facebook has peaked" "please follow me on Twitter or Facebook"

marcosdumay 9y ago
Well, "peaked" means it's as powerful as it will ever be.

SlowBro 9y ago

What are the masses switching to?

namelost 9y ago
The real world, let's hope.
- SlowBro 9y ago
  ...he wrote on a message board ;-)
- bernardino 9y ago
  Yay for the real world! I recently deleted almost all my accounts online, i.e. Github, LinkedIn, Twitter. I only have this account left and few others which are for learning purposes. I don't know for certain why, but I feel this need to be empty in a sort of way and do away with the non-essentials: digitally, physically, and internally, i.e. use the terminal instead of an ide, use technological devices less and do more natural things, and stop interpreting things, respectively. Though then again, I hope my nonexistent online presence is not a negative to future employers as I complete my bachelor's in a few years. It seems if you want to work for company x, you should be using product x. That's probably not the case but it does seem like it.
  - lou1306 9y ago
    Well, at least an active Github account is a sufficient (but non-necessary) proof that you have at least a basic understanding of Git. But still, there are lots of ways to captivate employers: a good old coding blog can beat many a LinkedIn profile.
jabwork 9y ago
I read this as an assertion the masses are losing interest overall, not switching to a competitor
- mathgeek 9y ago

dang 9y ago

I'm not sure if this article can support a substantive discussion or not, but thought it might be worth the trick of taking a more complex phrase for the title in the hope of stimulating more substantive responses. HN threads are often like those psych tests that measure complexity of response by time delay. It's a bit weird, but there's some reason to believe that just the small tax it imposes on the brain to parse a complex title may slow it down enough to discourage pure reflex in reaction. Reflective, not reflexive, reactions are what we're going for here.

pbalau 9y ago
If I understand correctly what you said, I think it worked. It took ~30 mins for the first "I dont use fb anymore because it's evil" reply. Unfortunatelly, not great debate started in the quaiet timeframe
JohnHammersley 9y ago
Thanks dang, I used the title from the article, but much prefer the updated one. Hoping it will generate some interesting discussion
sytse 9y ago
Love your consideration in order to get us to reflection.

VHRanger 9y ago

I mean Facebook has arguably reached all the audience it could reach. The only way they could keep growing is the increase time spent on their platform. That said Id conjecture the optimization towards short term reward cycles (more clickbaity articles being recommended, etc.) loses customer loyalty over the long run

IshKebab 9y ago
Yes but the point is that it is now losing people that it used to reach because it's too full of advertising, shitty memes and fwd:fwd:fwd: tag your friend in this if... And they never really adequately solved the "my aunt sent me a friend request and will be offended if I don't accept it" problem. Everything I used to share on Facebook I now share on WhatsApp because it has no advertising and my actual friends are likely to see it. Smart buy by Facebook.

juststeve 9y ago

social media has peaked? which sites are still growing in westernized countries?

TeeWEE 9y ago

I stopped looking often at Facebook. I don't like their upgrade and more people are posting stupid things on the network. To be honest I don't care about it anymore. Instagram, whatsapp and Snapchat have taken over most of Facebook imho.

0x7f800000 9y ago

Anecdotally, I'm one of the people who walked away from Facebook this year, due to exhaustion, disinterest, disgust, protest, or other (negative) reasons. I don't miss it and won't be going back. Amusingly, after about a week, Facebook started emailing me to try to entice me to come back. So I logged back in to disable those emails.

araes 9y ago

In a math sense, the signal to noise ratio on FB became much higher over the last decade. At inception, it was a focused way to directly communicate with a close college circle. Now its effectively as open as Myspace, bombards you with ads, and as with all wide networks, the discourse has dropped to meme / quiz bot level (Which annoying social media app represents you?!)

psyc 9y ago
I remember the main draw early on being the simple, uniform UI, especially in contrast to MySpace. White, blue, feed, photos. Product designers just never know when to quit.
- samsonradu 9y ago
  Well it certainly is a business decision. Likely Facebook knows better when it needs to canibalize its own product and squeeze the most profit out of it then move on. Instagram is now the social place to be.
rhizome 9y ago
In a math sense, the signal to noise ratio on FB became much higher over the last decade. At inception, it was a focused way to directly communicate with a close college circle. Now its effectively as open as Myspace, bombards you with ads, and as with all wide networks, the discourse has dropped to meme / quiz bot level I think you mean "much lower" signal to noise ratio.
- diegoperini 9y ago
  I'm a non native English speaker. Which one is more suitable for "less quality"?
  - lou1306 9y ago
    Lower. High SNR = Much signal, little noise Low SNR = Much signal, much noise

clay_the_ripper 9y ago

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Facebook account. Just having a Facebook account that you “don’t use” allows a massive amount of value (from an advertisers perspective) to be unlocked. In my opinion no other network is going to be able to compete with the number of users on facebooks platform, and any that do, Facebook will buy or copy (Instagram and Snapchat respectively). Even if you don’t actively look at anything on Facebook, or even log in, the fact that you have a Facebook account allows advertisers to track and target you with ads on all sorts of platforms and websites that are available to Facebook advertisers through the audience network (ad placements on millions of websites and mobile apps). The crucial moat that Facebook has is simply the massive nimber of registered users (that correspond to people’s real identity) on the platform combined with sophisticated tools to reach those users both on and off Facebook. I’d love to hear an opposing argument, but the way I see it Facebook is here to stay and will only get bigger and more profitable in the foreseeable future.

utellme 9y ago
It's correct and incorrect at the same time. Social networks like cars, they give value when it's being used. To sell ads social networks must be sure that someone scrolling feeds. No usage - no gains. Even with huge amount of users data nothing guaranteed. You can't sell same stuff periodically, big data has value only when they are actual.
- clay_the_ripper 9y ago
  That’s the point though-they don’t need you to scroll to make money off you. You only need a registered account, and they can track a massive amount about what you do online and then serve you ads across millions of sites and mobile apps. All of this happens off of Facebook owned properties.

utellme 9y ago

Almost nobody talks about lack of trust, yes there are words about fake news and formal reassurances from FB staff that they will investigate, fix and so on. But trust was already undermined, you just can't restore it to previous level. People were reading news in FB feed and didn't even think it can be fake, now they read and go "outside" for fact checking. Not a good sign for social network which wants you to be engaged all the time.

zer00eyz 9y ago
> People were reading news in FB feed and didn't even think it can be fake, now they read and go "outside" for fact checking. You know this is an interesting topic in and of itself. Are people looking outside FB for news? I would argue that if FB supports your world view that people aren't looking outside of it. Others have had the same theory: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli... The reality is that the internet provides a platform to even the most marginal ideas, time cubes, flat earths, and lots of rather stupid ideas that have no basis in logic or reason. If these things appeal to you seeing them in print and on video will only bolster ones false reasoning and allow you to further push out other points of view.
- utellme 9y ago
  I won't agree that internet provides you with such level of information. Internet is a service, it can't figure out your desires, but FB and other social networks really try to do it. The only reason such for fake news being spreaded everywhere are suggests and recommendations from social networks feed. They multiply junk and fakes.
dreamcompiler 9y ago
Trust is my issue too. I've put almost no personal information on FB since the day I opened my account. But over the last year it's gotten worse: I trust the news sources less, I trust the ads less, I deleted the FB app, and I trust the FB company least of all. That translates to me posting less and spending less time on the website, and never "just using FB" to sign up for another website. And you know what? I'm happier with less FB in my life.

dannyr 9y ago

This may be true for Facebook in the US and other developed countries. Facebook is still making inroads in countries that are just getting connectivity (like Myanmar). Revenues will come from developed countries though so I'm not sure if Facebook can sustain its business off developing countries.

omarforgotpwd 9y ago

Facebook is just getting started. Imagine you have a dataset that can identify over a billion people around the world simply by looking at their face. When you walk into McDonalds, cameras analyze you and the people you enter with. Oh, there's John Smith and his friend Tom. He loves the McFlurry. Instantly the digital menus rearrange to feature a large McFlurry, animating and advertising a deal on the largest size. Facebook is just beginning to monetize the value of what they have created.

sfilargi 9y ago
Facebook, the company != Facebook, the platform I think the arguments in the article, at least most of them, are focusing on the platform.
shostrift 9y ago
GDPR will prevent that unless there's an active opt-in, so you can strike out EU citizens from that scenario.
dasil003 9y ago
Why would Macdonald’s pay for that? Tom is already in McDonald’s and is going to buy what he wants. There’s no incremental value in making the menu confusing by changing it all the time.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  They’re not changing the menu, they’re just subtly highlighting things, offering discounts, etc. And yeah, he’s in the store already, but if they can sell him MORE on that visit, that’s good. How much do you think McDonalds would pay for a magic camera + menu that boosted all their store revenue by 5% overnight?
  - genghizkhan 9y ago
    Less than 5% of their revenue for sure.
  - 9y ago

scarface74 9y ago

Without going to deeply into the content of the article, just because a company has “peaked” doesn’t mean it’s “failing”. IBM peaked decades ago, but still has a somewhat successful business. Microsoft peaked in terms of influence probably a decade ago, but is still important. I doubt that Facebook will go the way of MySpace or Yahoo anytime soon.

askafriend 9y ago
Not only is Microsoft still important, their stock performance has been pretty phenomenal in the past decade.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

scythe 9y ago

Facebook just needs to lose its "evil" image. I could throw out ideas but let's face it everyone does that and I have zero experience running a social network. Right now the biggest obstacle facing Facebook is that people are starting to think that using Facebook is bad for you and bad for society. Facebook cannot survive in such a climate indefinitely. If it's true, make it false. If it's false, prove it.

rock_hard 9y ago
Well said. Though I could imagine that only <1% of FB users are aware of all the headlines we get served here on HN every day...so it’s probably not a real issue

git-pull 9y ago

They're influencing the internet in more ways than just social stuff, though. From a technology perspective, Facebook is doing solid work. And it looks like they're continuing the trend - rather than being at the end of it. Facebook's open source footprint is quite influential. Namely, React + Redux + Reselect are pretty sweet. React-Native. Haven't used it, but hhvm. And I haven't heard of this one before, but it looks cool: https://github.com/facebook/prepack https://github.com/facebook/prepack https://github.com/facebook https://github.com/facebook That's a nice portfolio.

bcherny 9y ago
Prepack is one of the coolest ideas to come out of FB OSS. The idea is to run your JS program as part of compilation, evaluating it as much as you can. Then take what's left in the heap and serialize it back to JS. Then ship that to browsers/devices. AFAIK, that sort of AoT evaluation has been limited to academia and niche applications in Haskell and OCaml because purity analysis is so tricky in languages that don't track effects.
- ikeyany 9y ago
  > The idea is to run your JS program as part of compilation, evaluating it as much as you can. Then take what's left in the heap and serialize it back to JS. Then ship that to browsers/devices. Could you elaborate on what is cool about that? I feel like I'm missing something...sounds like it analyzes javascript to make it run faster.
  - bcherny 9y ago
    If you have some JavaScript code, it goes through a few phases as it's evaluated by your browser: 1. Parsing 2. JIT optimizing 3. Compilation to bytecode 4. Re-optimization as the program runs Steps 1 and 2 are expensive, and there are a few ways to cut down on them: - Removing dead code before you ship - Optimizing your code for the JIT compiler (eg. Closure Compiler does this) - Webassembly - Pre-evaluating your code with Prepack More philosophically, the question is "when does my code run?". The answer has usually been "on the client". With Prepack, the answer is "as much as possible during compilation, and the remainder on the client".

LewYard 9y ago

Are we talking about facebook.com the website, or Facebook the company ?

greggarious 9y ago

I deleted my Facebook account two years ago (Valentine's day 2016). Before doing so I reached out to my close/medium ties and exchanged numbers, encouraging them to check out Signal as a way to contact me. Some of them demurred (nothing to hide) but pretty much everyone adopted Signal after the election, heh. I don't have a huge amount of "friends" now, but I have a small group of people I text or call occasionally. I feel happier and more connected than I did using Facebook.

starchild_3001 9y ago

Hey guys, don't believe in doomsayers. Market (aggregate opinion of investors) is often smarter than each individual. The market assigns a fairly healthy P/E ratio to FB. Similar to that of Google. Both better than that of AAPL. All in all, I'd ignore this dude's predictions. Facebook has a bunch of smart people. Market is factoring in plenty of growth into FB's stock. Given market's expectations, I'd bet this guy is wrong. https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/pe-ratio https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/pe-ratio https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/goog/pe-ratio https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/goog/pe-ratio http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/pe-ratio http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/pe-ratio (2018 was a special year due to a one-time write-off, check out 2019 and beyond)